


Same Cloth

by BusinessFish



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Chameleon Arch (Doctor Who), Gen, I was reminded of this during Fugitive of the Judoon lol, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23251120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BusinessFish/pseuds/BusinessFish
Summary: Written pre-Judoon (and pre-season-11, actually, not long after Jodie was first announced). A quick one-shot imagining if one of the Doctor's companions ended up being a Chameleon Arch-ed future regeneration. Ended up being... almost kind of close?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Same Cloth

Janet knew two of the alien cartridges were in the library, and at least one was in her room — but where?! She tore through her closet, her workbenches - nothing. She made an incoherent noise of frustration, thinking of the time crunch, and took a deep breath to calm herself down. She stood in the center of the room and looked at all possible locations, making sure not to miss any.

“Bed, thoroughly checked. Dresser, _intimately_ checked.” Her gaze swept across the small table in the corner of the room and continued to the closet door… then went back. A small table, just one or two things on it. Odd. It wasn’t _un_ familiar, but she never really paid much attention to it. Somewhere to carelessly toss a cartridge meant to be used in a wedding pendant for the Machine Gun Bride, maybe?

She glanced behind her, towards the hallway. From afar, she could hear the Doctor swearing. She had left her deep under the TARDIS console, saying something about disassembling and reassembling. They were on a tight schedule, but it was always possible that something down there would completely derail the Doctor and they’d all die for a reason that wasn’t them not knowing what kind of thing the Gods of Oil used in their nuptials. 

Well, nothing here. Janet figured she’d check the library for the two she was sure of.

With one hand on the doorframe on the way out of the room, she was struck by a feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

She looked back. Looked forward. The feeling was still there. She looked back again and, like a jolt, there it was. The corner table. She had completely forgotten about it in the span of, what, fifteen seconds?

This wasn’t normal. This was an out-of-the-ordinary thing and traveling with the Doctor had made her out-of-the-ordinary-thing senses strong and true. 

Damn the cartridges. It would work out, the Doctor would marry someone if she had to, in all senses in which that sentence functioned. Janet stepped closer to the table, keeping her eyes on it the entire time, almost scared to blink. How long had it been in her room? As far back as she remembered, she was pretty sure. Always there, always in the corner that she never looked in. She had never used it, never consciously registered it until right… now.

There was a small, blue, velvet box in the center of the table. A golden circle of intricate Gallifreyan text adorned the top. The TARDIS hummed, once, and Janet registered it, noticing from a distance, feeling it brushing against her mind like a cat. Interesting. Interesting that the time machine would be reacting to this, cementing it as, actually, a quite unusual thing.

Without really meaning to, Janet found her hands reaching out for the box. It was heavy; whatever was inside was solid and dense. She was in a trance, she observed. The TARDIS hummed again. Not a dangerous trance, then, or the TARDIS would be alerting the Doctor. Well, alright.

Janet opened the box.

* * *

The business with the wedding went surprisingly quickly and without drama, the Doctor thought. Sure, it had been an unpleasant realization that the cartridges they had thought were free for taking and dissecting had _actually_ been meant for the MCB on the MCWD — that’s Machine Gun Wedding Day — but they had managed. Janet had scuttled by her with three of the cartridges in her arms as the Doctor had emerged from deep under the console victorious with two more, and then there had been a lot of breathless explaining and negotiating and maybe a little begging before the happy couple realized that the day had been well and truly saved. There had been dancing, of course, and the Doctor was never one to turn down a wedding dance, not on a day when nobody died, even if that day happened to be on a small moon full of cyborg outcasts all fitted organically with some form of weaponry.

Janet had not been there for that part. This was unusual, because Janet was normally the first one on the dance floor (“One of my greatest joys in life is forcing people to watch me dance,” she had told the Doctor once at a solstice festival in Vector Four, and had launched into a routine full of flailing limbs and poorly-choreographed booty shakes; the Doctor had never been so proud). She had actually been awfully quiet since the mad search around the TARDIS for the things, now that the Doctor thought back.

She gave a _very gentle_ parting fist-bump to a man with an anvil for a hand and quietly excused herself back to the TARDIS.

Janet was standing at the console, not moving, just standing with her hands resting on the controls, leaning over them. She didn’t look up when the Doctor came in. 

The door clattered shut. The Doctor took a few steps forward but stopped short. Something - something was different. Something had changed, in a major way. 

The TARDIS thrummed warmly. At this, Janet looked up and at the Doctor. She was smiling - a normal smile, one that reached her eyes, not anything possessed or evil or contrived - the Doctor realized she was trying to diagnose her. What was it? It was something she should be noticing. 

She realized that it wasn’t _Janet’s_ smile, not really. It was close, and it had all the characteristics of a Janet smile — empathy, kindness, barely concealed glee. A look of sharing the joke. But it was… sadder, almost. Older, the Doctor would have said if she didn’t know better.

“Are you alright?” the Doctor asked, after a moment too long. Janet’s gaze dropped but the smile widened, like it was a funny question, and she stood up straight, away from the console. She looked back up at the Doctor, and now there was regret in that smile as well. And the Doctor didn’t like it one bit.

“What’s happened?” she asked, very softly, like she didn’t want to hear the answer. 

Janet took a step towards her, then stopped. She put one hand in her trouser pocket in a very un-Janet-like way, and the other again reached out for the console, stroking it softly, finding strength there. 

“I found a box in my room,” she said, looking at the Doctor. “It had been there for a long time, but I had never really seen it before.”

The Doctor said nothing. She had an awful feeling, a pit in her stomach, the nigglings of something _way too off_.

“A perception filter,” Janet said.

The Doctor said nothing.

“I opened it. Inside was this.” Janet pulled a fob watch out of her jacket pocket and held it up.

Instantly, the Doctor had her sonic out, retreating to the doors of the TARDIS. “ _Master_ ,” she snarled.

Janet laughed, just as the Master might have, but - no. Not just as the Master might have. The Master wouldn’t have laughed like that, genuinely, out of understanding and… and love.

“I’m not the Master, you buffoon. I get it, of course, but no.”

“Then who?” said the Doctor, even more softly than before. She knew. Of course she knew. It didn’t make any sense, it was unthinkable, in thousands and trillions of years of traversing the universe and regenerating and meeting people, something like this had never —

“You know who I am,” the person who had never really been Janet said. “I remember when you figured it out.”

“Say it.”

The person at the console stepped forward. She still looked like Janet, sounded like her, spoke like her, but it was all — shifted. She looked like her, but she was carrying herself differently. Her words had a different weight behind them. There was something else behind her eyes.

She smiled, as gently as she could, and the Doctor was grateful.

“I’m the Doctor,” she said. And the smile bloomed into a grin.

**Author's Note:**

> Does this count as traveling alone


End file.
